In thinking about continued feedback about lack of discoverability on Micro.blog, how to add more special emoji (or expand beyond them), I had an idea to share.
Discover, as I understand it, is a curated feed run primarily by @jean. She looks at something close to the “firehose” of all posts and can promote things into Discover.
I wonder if Micro.blog can abandon the emoji system in favor of using categories (especially as that becomes more present in various interfaces). Categories are mostly for us on our blogs right now, but they can also generate candidate “firehose” feeds. “Blessed” categories, such as those with the emoji feeds today, can have a feed that a moderator can publish to the discover/${category} feed. We can start with existing emoji feeds, but maybe there can be a mechanism for category feed recommendation and creation.
Rather than have Jean or Manton or someone paid by Micro.blog moderate these feeds, I am imagining them running like subreddits do with a volunteer community moderator. For example, @Miraz might want to moderate a custommb feed that’s all posts about messing around with customizing your Micro.blog/Hugo.
This would be a huge ask for Micro.blog-- although at least some of these administrator-like tools clearly exist, this would require exposing those tools to a whole new class of users. You’d need a process for selecting and removing moderators. You’d also need a process for selecting and removing topics/categories. And we’d have to have a mechanism to communicate existing categories.
That said, the volunteer human curation/moderation method already does work well across the web. It avoids post spam and slows down a feed far below the level of “real time”. I think those methods combine should reduce Manton’s concern about harassment.
To be honest, the auto posting of emoji into feeds has long suggested to me that the harassment concern is fairly unlikely to be derived from aggregating topical posts. I think the main advantage is only aggregating pre-determined categories, which I think serves to reduce the ability for nascent vectors to pop up incredibly fast and discourages category spamming.